When Nick Erdenberger first joined the sales team at Contactually over 3 years ago, the company was using an in-house custom-built integration to connect Salesforce, HubSpot, and their in-house postgreSQL database. Working intimately within Salesforce everyday, it didn’t take Nick long to realize that the company’s custom-built integration “solution” just wasn’t cutting it.

“We had an integration at the time that our engineers built that was pushing data [between our various business systems],” said Nick. “The problem was that it would crash a lot. It would blast Salesforce and blow through our API calls. In addition, the integration was falling very far behind the app’s data and people were seeing very out of date data. If you pulled a phone number in Salesforce, it was different than the number you would see in HubSpot and probably different than the number you would see if you went directly into our database.”

This was an operations nightmare that was impeding the sales team from working as efficiently and effectively as they could to close deals. Nick took on the onus of solving this data issue, and as he gradually transitioned into becoming the full time operations “guy,” it became clear to him that the smart decision for the company would be to reach outside for help integrating their various sales and marketing systems.

About Contactually

Founded in 2011, Contactually is a software and service company based in Washington DC offering an innovative CRM designed to help people generate more business from their existing network of relationships. Rather than focusing on listing out all of a person’s contacts, Contactually helps people stay connected to their contacts over time.

Claiming over 7500 customers including KWNYC and First Team, Contactually has grown rapidly in just a few years. It works by aggregating, cleaning, and merging contacts from a collection of major communication channels (email, calendars, social networks, phone calls). It then helps people organize, automate, and improve their everyday communication through customizable communication templates, handy tools for managing introductions, sharing articles, and more. In addition, Contactually enables automated outreach to contacts as well as the ability to track progress of different business deals associated with one’s contacts.

Moreover, they needed the data to be clean, accurate and up-to-date and didn’t want to keep investing valuable developer time working on something that wasn’t going to bring any money back into the company.

For all of these reasons, Nick and his team decided to retire their custom integration and replace it with Bedrock Data’s systems integration platform. Contactually does a lot of their reporting in Salesforce and utilizes a lot of custom objects and formula fields. As such, they needed an integration solution that would support such features as well as enable all of their data from HubSpot and their internal database to get into Salesforce. They also wanted to make sure that valuable information about their customers - such as app usage data and sales related information - was up-to-date and accessible in HubSpot.

This setup not only ensured that all customer, user and payment information was consistent between all of their business systems, but it enabled them to instantaneously leverage this data for better and more targeted sales and marketing efforts. For example, if someone signed up for an account on their app, this information would be updated in Salesforce and HubSpot, which would not only trigger the sales cycle, but would also trigger targeted marketing campaigns in HubSpot specific to such user behavior.

Unforeseen Benefits

Aside from the obvious benefit of finally having accurate, up-to-date data across Contactually’s multiple business systems, Nick emphasized that they saw several additional advantages to implementing a well-built, easy-to-use 3rd party integration such as Bedrock Data.

Time (and money) Saver: “If I had to do all this myself, it would probably take me 4-5 months to write all the custom code to move data between Salesforce and HubSpot, [and between all of the other business apps we use and now want to integrate with]. By using Bedrock Data, we are able to cut out tons of custom code and tons of time”

Agility: Small businesses need to be able to move quickly and change things on the fly. If you have a custom integration that requires writing custom code to modify and maintain, there are just far fewer people to delegate such tasks to. By making something that is traditionally done with code, ‘point-and-click,’ you’re able to do things not just faster, but more people are able to do it and it makes the whole business’ back-end operations a lot more flexible.”

Support: “[As Operations people] when we buy, we want to know that there is someone at the other end who going to make sure we don’t get [screwed]. If something breaks, I need someone to talk to and [Bedrock Support] has always been there.” Not only was Nick consistently impressed by the level of attention paid to him by Bedrock’s support team, but he emphasized how instrumental they were in helping him to understand how to set up and think about integrations on the whole. “Teaching was a big aspect.”

Growth: Being part of a growing company, Nick and his team are constantly adding new applications to manage different aspects of the business. Having recently added Stripe, Desk.com, and Intercom, Nick now wants these applications to be integrated as well. Instead of having to invest another 4-5 months of developer time to building out these integrations, Nick can now just add them to his existing Bedrock integration with mere “point-and-click.” Again, this reinforces the benefits of implementing agile and time savvy solutions when scaling as a business.

“If I had to do all this myself, it would probably take me 4-5 months to write all the custom code to move data between Salesforce and HubSpot. By using Bedrock Data, we are able to cut out tons of custom code... and tons of time”